Individual Protagonists, Literary Communities, and the Collective Rights of Tribal Nations in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

This essay argues that Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine makes visible the subject of collective rights of recent indigenous political activism by reshaping the usual conflict between individual protagonists and the societies they inhabit, the conflict between what Georg Lukács calls “the soul and the world.” Moreover, I contend that, while tribalist, the novel’s politics of representation differ from those of Native American nationalism, which tasks literature and criticism with establishing a tribal nation’s cultural distinctiveness.